Energy efficient protocol for improving the QoS of wireless sensor networks

In multihop wireless networks, packets of a flow originating from a source node are relayed by intermediate nodes (relay nodes) and travel towards their destination along a multihop wireless path. Since the traffic forwarding capability of each node varies according to its level of contention, ideally, a node should not transmit more packets to its relay node than the corresponding relay node can forward. Instead, each node should yield its channel access opportunity to its neighbor nodes so that all the nodes can evenly share the channel and have similar forwarding capabilities. In this manner, nodes can utilize the wireless channel effectively and further increase the end-to-end throughput of a multihop path. This paper focuses on congestion control over multihop wireless networks. In a wireless network, an important constraint that arises is that due to the MAC (Media Access Control) layer. In this paper, we develop a fair hop-by-hop congestion control algorithm with the MAC constraint being imposed in the form of a channel access time constraint, using an optimization-based framework.